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Probably Not A Bomb (Jam Version)'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Enjoyment | #664 | 3.895 | 3.895 |
| Narrative | #1447 | 3.263 | 3.263 |
| Audio | #1983 | 3.316 | 3.316 |
| Creativity | #2894 | 3.605 | 3.605 |
| Artwork | #2912 | 3.447 | 3.447 |
Ranked from 38 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
You have to complete each floor quickly as you're always under pressure from a package that definitely isn't a bomb you must deliver before it counts down to zero and... ruins the birthday suprise!
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Everything - I, me, myself.
(Optional) What would you like to be called if GMTK features your game?
ITheServer
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Comments
Fun & fast-paced! It could do with a bit more challenge though. Maybe larger mazes at some point? I also ran into a bug when I got to floor 31 where everything disappeared and I couldn't move.
Fun game with a good design, I'm impressed how much you've managed to squeeze out of a fundamentally simple concept (solving mazes).
Soooo much fun! Got to floor 11 and then got a bit greedy hahaahah. Great job! Very polished and had a blast!
The greed is always tempting lol! Thanks for playing!
The presentation was really polished, and I had a good time trying to rush back to the door. Even the levels I couldn't complete felt like I could've made it if I played a little cleaner, which imo is exactly the kind of feeling you want to evoke with games like this, so good work!
Thanks for the compliments! I really appreciate the feedback.
I really liked the music and it was stressful but fun to play. I thought the art and writing were cute and cohesive too.
I'm glad you liked it. Thanks for playing!
A cute little Rogue-lite(?) game that was pretty fun, if i had one criticism it would the movement could been a bit more smooth, I got stuck on walls a bit too much for a game with corridors to tight, outside of that though. Pretty good, good job!
Thanks for the comment! The janky movement is a valid criticism, I should have made the collider smaller than the actual player. Thanks again for playing!
Sometimes the simplest games are the ones that make you realize how late it is because you spent too much time playing a completely unbalanced game!!! Well done! Have to go!
Can agree with you on the balance lol! Thanks for taking the time to play my game!
As soon as you choose to invest in making money for how many seconds you have left the entire game loop is trivialized and you can buy all upgrades every round by just hightailing to the exit and ignoring the pickups. There was no possibility of failure when I closed the game with over $1000 on floor 46. There's some math behind making a game like this work and having scaling difficulty match well with your scaling power that I'm sure you can find some good tutorials on for next time you make a game like this one, but it's also important to make sure your mechanics and modifiers work together and complement one another rather than against each other. A modifier that gave me more cash if I managed to collect everything or gave me a lumped sum that subtracted a dollar for each upgrade left on the board would have pushed me to engage more with the core game and think about my build rather than checking out as soon as the amount of money I made outpaced the cost of new upgrades.
That said, you got me to play a game with a fundamentally broken economy for over 30 minutes because it just felt so damn juicy and satisfying to play, so big props on game feel. Keep making games!
Thanks for the honest feedback. I think I really got my priorities wrong this jam, and neglected playtesting for polish. Because of this, I completely overestimated my scaling and how it would perform keeping the player in check and eventually ending their run, leading to most runs scaling into crazy numbers until breaking via bugs I never thought the player would encounter. I’m glad you pointed this out because it was a pretty big mistake that did significantly hurt the game.
I also didn’t think synergies through enough. For example, “Clock speed” ($ for time remaining at the end of a level) actively incentives reaching the exit as fast as possible instead of rewarding exploration and pushing your luck. This trivialises the game significantly, especially since it’s so impactful of an upgrade.
Because of this, I am considering making a post jam build addressing these issues so I appreciate your suggestion, as it does help me think through why I added an upgrade. At its core, an upgrade should help encourage the player to interact with the gameplay loop with rewards rather than pushing them away. Many of the upgrades actually remove from the game so they will certainly be getting changed to complement each other.
I’m glad to see sacrificing the balance wasn’t all for nothing as I was quite proud of the polish at the end so I’m happy that other people found it satisfying!
Thanks for leaving such an in-depth comment. Although critical, it is definitely valid and I would rather critical comments than positive ones. Mistakes are how you improve, right? I will definitely be taking what you said into account. Thanks again!
Absolutely. Keep at it! Interested to see how the post-jam build plays out! Give me a holler when it's out and I'll definitely give it a play :)
I finished the post jam build! I tried to keep a similar time constraint to the jam so it still has one or two bugs as I focused most of my efforts on balance, but the game scales much faster and the upgrades focus more on incentivising gameplay rather than skipping it. I changed over half the upgrades and even added two more, so hopefully the economy should be more balanced. If you want to give it a go, here is the link: https://itheserver.itch.io/probably-not-a-bomb
its pretty fun. difficulty increase kept me on edge.
Thanks for playing! I’m glad you found it fun.